Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, by Blake Snyder is, as you might have guessed, a book on screenwriting. But let me just tell you why screenwriting books are so very good for writers of all kinds. Screenwriters have story figured out. They have visual writing figured out. And in our day and age, if we’re going to compete with things like movies and television shows, we have to get those things figured out, too. That’s why I like to add screenwriting books to my rotation of writing books that I read.
Save the Cat is actually an older screenwriting book, but it still contains everything you need to know about how to tell a great story. I found it helpful for tightening up my brainstorm process. I even changed my brainstorm process when I read a section where Snyder talked about how he uses index cards for his brainstorming. I don’t know why the thought never occurred to me, but now I do the same. I’m a more visual person, and brainstorming exclusively on a computer has always felt a little empty to me. The last novel I brainstormed, I used index cards to write out scenes, record the emotion of those scenes and clarify the conflict, and I had a stack of 40 cards before I even knew it.
Snyder writes in a casual and humorous tone. He doesn’t use a lot of screenwriter terminology, so that made Save the Cat easy to understand and learn from.
One of the things I enjoyed about Snyder’s book was his permission to not be too wordy. I hate when books are too wordy. There are some 800-pagers I read that I think, if I were the editor, I would have cut this by about 400 pages. You don’t have to worry about that with Snyder. His book is short and sweet and full of helpful information that any writer can use to improve their craft. And he’ll urge you to be short and sweet, too, which I found refreshing.
I’ve already incorporated Snyder’s brainstorm process into my own, and it’s been working better than I expected. His suggestions on how to improve the visual nature of your writing has really helped the scenes I’m creating on the page come to life.
Not only that, but I just really enjoyed getting to know Snyder in his pages. I think he would have been a fun guy to know. Snyder died in 2009, but his books are a treasure for the writing and screenwriting world.
*The above is an affiliate link. I only recommend books I find valuable myself. I don’t even actually talk about the books I don’t find valuable, because I try to forget I wasted time on them.
